


Nott, the Brave! In: The Case of the Teleporting Gerblins

by nonbinarycoded



Category: Critical Role (Web Series), The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Inspired by Fanart, nott stealths so hard she ends up in a whole other campaign
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 06:59:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16090442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonbinarycoded/pseuds/nonbinarycoded
Summary: Inspired by Sam's, "I rolled a 38 stealth, I'm playing with the McElroys right now!" joke.Nott hid so well that she temporarily vanished from existence. Somewhere, worlds away, a little goblin girl stuck her head out of a shop aisle and watched three of the weirdest people she'd ever seen scam some poor sucker out of a magic item.





	Nott, the Brave! In: The Case of the Teleporting Gerblins

**Author's Note:**

> During the fight in episode 34, Sam made a crack about his absurd stealth roll making Nott vanish and reappear in the McElroy's campaign. That lead to my post explaining it [here (x),](http://nonbinaryvexahlia.tumblr.com/post/178124601477/what-did-sam-mean-when-he-said-the-thing-about) which lead to the lovely Fwishbone drawing my explanation up as a comic [here (x)!](https://fwishbone.tumblr.com/post/178129821755/based-on-nonbinaryvexahlias-post-here-not) Please check out that comic, it's adorable!

Nott wasn't going to pretend like she understood teleportation very well. Caleb had tried to explain it to her several times, and while he was a _very_ good teacher, she could only really ever grasp the basics. Caleb would lose himself in technical terms quickly and leave anyone listening in the dust, but Nott had asked him to explain enough times that she was starting to get the basics. One thing she understood perfectly clearly was that teleportation was something that required an extreme amount of skill, and was absolutely under no circumstances whatsoever something that just happened _accidentally_.

So she was really at a loss as to what the fuck had just happened.

And she may have been panicking just ever so slightly, sure, but some of that was residual panic from standing over approximately her entire height in water less than 10 seconds ago, so really, that panic didn't count towards the overall panic of suddenly being _not at all_ where she should have been.

Alright. Okay. This was fine. She didn't need to panic. She was a _fantastic_ detective, even though Jester didn't seem to have come with her. What did detectives do in this situation? What did _anyone_ do in this situation?

Retrace her steps.

They'd made it into the... water processing... something. It wasn't a sewer; the water had been too clean. They'd made it into a room filled with far too much water for her liking, and they'd seen their mark. And she'd watched everyone else ready their weapons and their spells, so she did what she was best at— she hid. She dove behind a tall pillar in the room, all the while thinking about how she'd really rather be absolutely anywhere but exactly where she was, surrounded by water and staring down creatures that seemed to be both very angry and very made of water.

And then she wasn't.

She'd closed her eyes while diving, a panicked reaction to diving face-first at a pool even though she knew she wouldn't actually break through the surface— _what if the ring fails just this one time what if it breaks or falls off what if I fall in_ — And when she'd righted herself and opened them again, she was standing in a well-stocked aisle of a shop, dripping water onto a wooden floor.

How was retracing your steps supposed to help? Because everything about her situation made as much sense as it had the first time around.

Of second most importance, directly behind how she'd got there, was the question of where 'there' even was. Nothing on any of the shelves around her looked familiar, and neither did the shop itself. She heard arguing from around the corner of the aisle— _stupid, she should have been looking out for people first thing, how did she miss people_ arguing _?—_ and carefully poked her head out to watch.

What she got was a side-view of what seemed to be the world's most beleaguered shopkeeper bickering with some of the most strangely-dressed people she'd ever seen in her life. The very next thing that caught her eye were the display cases hung behind the counter; glass boxes showed off extremely flashy, shimmering weapons and objects. The cases hung around a gaudy yellow and red sign that read, "Under 300? We card! Magic items sales prohibited."

"As I've explained to you before," the halfling behind the counter said, "A truly mind-boggling, painstaking amount of times, I only work here. I don't— I didn't set these prices. It's not my fault they're this high. I can do literally nothing about it."

"But we saved the planar-verse!" A bulky, scarred human man seemed to be leading the negotiations, flanked by a dwarf with an eyepatch and a bushy, flower-spotted beard. Nott was pretty sure the person behind them was an elf, but he'd never seen an elf with such long, floppy ears. The human set his hands on the counter. "Doesn't that qualify us for some kind of discount?"

" _No."_

"What about a senior citizen's discount? Merle definitely qualifies for that!"

" _Hey!_ First you take my arm, then you insult my age—" The dwarf leaned up to smack the human's shoulder, and sure enough, the arm that had been hidden from Nott's sight seemed to be fake, made of wood and vines. She'd never stolen a limb from someone's body before, but she'd never seen anything like it, and part of her burned with the need to know how it worked.

"I mean, what are you, some 269 years old?" The elf spoke up.

The human snickered and muttered, "Nice," as the dwarf made a squawk of displeasure.

"I'll have you know I'm a cool 247, not that it's any of your business!" But Nott was distracted from the rest of the argument. She couldn't believe she hadn't taken longer to look at... whatever it was the elf had going on. She couldn't see the front of their seemingly-bedazzled crop top, but the back read, '...that few can afford.' High waisted shorts and a massive, floppy hat pulled together the loudest outfit Nott had ever seen in her life, and that wasn't even what she was most interested in. Behind their back, the elf was tracing patterns in the air, and a long, thin, blue wisp began to trail from their hand and form a ghostly hand of its own.

With a flick of their fingers, the elf sent the ghostly hand down and around the back of the counter, then up the display cases. Their hand began to mimic the ghosts as it deftly undid the latch, swung the case open, and beelined for a large, polished stone above a plaque that read, 'Stone of Good Luck'. The hand plucked the stone from its stand, then nudged the case shut once more and started to float back towards the trio.

And then Nott slipped.

The water trailing off the ends of her coat had left the floor slick, and when she'd tried to shift her weight one of her feet slid out from under her and she threw herself against the shelves to stay upright—

All four people at the counter turned towards her at the noise, leaving the spell abandoned and the stone plummeting towards the floor. The human man noticed this and dove across the counter to try to save it, and Nott had exactly enough time to think, _I need to be back with my friends right this second immediately,_ before she heard a gentle _pop_ and she was standing behind a pillar, on top of too many feet of water, watching her friends prepare to fight. It seemed like no time at all had passed since she left.

Dazed, she pulled her crossbow from its sling at her side and readied a bolt. Had she hit her head? Had that all been an extremely compelling daydream? Had she suddenly mastered the art of teleportation, or divination?

She'd have to talk to Caleb about this. And perhaps Jester, for good measure. This was a mystery she didn't think she could solve alone.

* * *

 Taako had _nearly_ had this thing pocketed when some fool had gone and decided to pull an entire shelf down on their head behind him. It distracted everyone, which would've been perfect, but in a (rare, unusual) moment of discomposure, he'd been distracted too. The spell he'd been working on dissipated as he whipped around and watched a little gerblin girl stare at him with a terrified deer-in-the-torchlights expression on her face, and then vanish into thin air.

Someone seeing his magnificent heist work wouldn't have bothered him, alright, no feathers ruffled there; in fact, they should have been taking notes on this master class he was providing free of charge. But the vanishing act was a little out of his range of expertise.

And he _wanted_ to move on and do damage control for his little caper, but when he'd spun around he saw Magnus spinning the opposite direction and then heard the distinct sound of someone in full-body-armor throwing their whole ass across a counter, so he had to keep the clerk's attention on that aisle faster than immediately.

"Holy shit y'all, teleporting gerblins! I think I saw her grab something, did you?"

The clerk was shaken, but not enough to distract from the two-ton wall of grade-A adventuring beef splayed out over the counter next to him. Luckily, he'd turned back just after Magnus was finished launching the stone at Merle, who'd pocketed it.

"What. Are you doing."

"...Admiring the _very_ tidy workspace you keep back here. What organizational system do you use? Are these folders alphabetical, or...?" Magnus asked, head hanging over the back of the counter, idly thumbing through some binders hidden beneath.

The clerk pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered something that sounded like it ended in, 'my shop'.

"Run that one by me again?" Taako leaned in.

"Get _out of my SHOP._ "

"I thought you said that this wasn't your shop and that's why you couldn't give us any—" Merle raised an accusatory finger at the halfling as Magnus launched himself back over the counter and scooped up his friends in either arm.

"You-make-a-fantastic-point-sir-we'll-be-leaving-right-now-have-a-good-rest-of-your-day!" He blurted out in a rush as he carried his friends out the front door.

"...And take your teleporting gerblins with you!"

 


End file.
